


Shards of the Past

by TheFlamingNymph



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Archery, Childhood Memories, Gen, Loss, Loss of Faith, Loss of Innocence, Memories, Rain, loss of family, loss of sibling
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-30
Updated: 2015-07-20
Packaged: 2018-04-07 01:02:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4243530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheFlamingNymph/pseuds/TheFlamingNymph
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Short stories of my Lavellan's past thought of as I play through. No overall framing narrative yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Shattered Innocence

**Author's Note:**

> So trying to format these in the form of true memory (in italics) and corresponding conversation with a companion (Usually Solas) about events to highlight more the personality of my Lavellan and what she will and won't reveal. Tell me how it works!

_Face splattered with blood. It’s all wrong, wrong blood, wrong death, wrong prey. It was in her mouth, but she couldn’t retch, not here. Couldn’t look away. Hands warm with blood as she fumbles over the body, hand wrapping around the worn wood of the bow, yanking, tugging, prying it free from the weight that laid on it. Fingers scrabbling against the ground, grabbing what few arrows they found._

_Flinching as it bellows, towering over her, spittle flying from it’s mouth. More prey. Her. Couldn’t. Couldn’t let it. Someone had to tell the clan. Her parents. Vanera. The glove was on the wrong hand. He had forgotten, she hadn’t thought, The glove was on the right. It was wrong. Shaking, the arrow notches into place. String bites the untested hand, punishes the untested skin._

_“Fly straight and do not waver.” It lacks the strength he said it with. Full draw. Deep breath, steady yourself. Do not blink, do not move. Ignore the pain. “Bend but never break.”_

_Fingers release. String snaps and thrums. Sharp pain. Fresh blood, rivers down her cheek. Gold swallows the arrow. Swallows all but the end. Brown hair. Bloody. Flag that marks the kill. Its still roaring, but different. The wind blows and it topples and she sits, body shaking but eyes dry. She sits. Silent. Can’t leave. Not him. Can’t leave him.The mantra is unfinished. She cannot. Not the way he taught her. Together was not stronger. The one was stronger._

_Too silent for too long. Paws pad and black fur arrives. Green meets grey. No words. Still air between them. Feral child and feral animal. Not different. No fear. No difference. The same. Gone as silent as it appeared. She stays, a bloody vigil._

_The hunters come. Not what they wanted to see. But better. One alive. Thought both dead. They talk, she doesn’t answer. She doesn’t look. No. Go away. Let the forest have her. They didn’t. Dead wood pried from deadened fingers. Two entered the forest, one returns with an entourage. Parents crying. Tight hugs. Praise to the Creators. To Mythal. To Sylaise. Cursing the Dread Wolf._

_One day. Two days. A week. A month. Then she speaks. The lie comes easy. She ran. He followed. Died protecting her. The blood stays on her, and he goes cleanly to the Creators. No new sister. No pelt as offering of betrothal. Instead, a tree. A funeral._

_Fly straight and do not waver. Bend but never break. The one must be stronger, because together isn’t forever._

“The scar?” She blinked, touching the part of her head that was usually covered by short fuzz, recently shaved. She felt the uneven skin underneath. Pink blossomed over her cheeks as she covered it fully. “I forget there’s a scar. My clan never mentioned it.” She fixed Solas with an embarassed grin. “Hunting mishap when I was a kid, my first time really shooting a bow. My hair got caught in the fletching of the arrow. Learned never to do that again.”

“That must have been quite the experience.” If he was amused, he only revealed it in the slight quirk of his lips and a slight change in tone. As much as that tone of aloofness tended to nettle their companions, she considered it a victory any time she could prod his demeanor in any way. It made the moments together special, something only she could do. “Except for the fact that it is shaved on the left, and you draw your bow to the right.”

“Observant, aren’t we? I’m left handed, naturally. The one oddball in the clan, it would seem.” She leaned on the balcony, letting the wind ruffle her hair, closing her eyes. “The Anchor makes it hard to draw to the left of me, especially near rifts. The nerves set alight, and I can’t grip the string as steady as I need to. I adjusted. I guess that makes me ambidextrous. At least with a bow.” She couldn’t guess at what he was thinking now as he also turned to the wind. Another mystery for her to try and draw out of him later. Another challenge, another excuse to seek him out in his study. She knew that he knew she was making excuses, but even so, he seemed to delight in being able to impart his knowledge onto another, especially one so eager to learn.


	2. In The Rain

_Her lips press together as she bears the pain. Too much pain on the left side. She knew as soon as they started that it wasn’t the design she wanted nor expected. She was not getting the markings of Andruil like her brother before her. It was Sylaise they were branding her with. Why? The protector and not the hunter? She couldn’t speak. To make any noise would prove her to not be ready for them, and she couldn’t risk that. She had worried whether they would ever end up granting her her vallaslin. Too impulsive, they had told her several times. She took too many risks, endangered too many people._

_She didn’t see it that way. She just didn’t fear what the rest of the clan did. Death didn’t frighten her. It hadn’t, not since her First Shot, as she’d come to think of it. Death happened, and it happened both ways. You were either killed, or you killed, either way, life went on. Wolves didn’t scare her like many of her peers, either. She asked for stories of the Dread Wolf where others had asked for Andruil’s or Falon’Din._

_She looked at herself in the still of the water, at the purple mark over her left eye, the blood that wept from it. She touched it gently with a damp cloth, cleaning it, muscles twitching at the pain. She could see the similarities to her brother in her own face. The high cheekbones, with their perpetual blush, the taper of her cheeks into the strong chin, but the mark of Sylaise laid over her left eye in purple, instead of the bow of Andruil in blue. It was the one thing she had wanted out of this rite of passage, a tribute to her brother who had been brave and bold and the only one willing to listen to her theories and help sate her curiosity._

_Slowly the pool rippled as fat droplets splashed one by one into the water, a gentle tapping, a slow rhythm that drummed the water in increasing frequency until all sound was lost except for the roaring. Her clan had retreated to their tents and aravels, and she remained. She turned her face to the sky, the cold of the rain sapping the pain from her face, soothing the pain. Warm rivers down her cheeks were cooled and consumed by the others running down her face, through her hair, down her arms. She welcomed the rain and sound, and the solitude it brought._

“What are you doing up there, Vhenan?” Came the elder elf’s curious tone, looking up at the tree in which she had perched herself over night. He had his back to the rain that plagued the Storm Coasts in unending fury. It didn’t take anyone especially intelligent to tell she had been up there all night, with how her leather armor clung to her like a second skin.

“Enjoying the rain.” She grinned at him, water dripping off of her nose. “I adore storms. They’re calming, don’t you think?”

“That would not be the word most would use to describe storms, no.” He shook his head, watching as she dropping down out of the tree, her bare feet digging their toes into the sand to maintain balance. "But I believe we established that you are a creature entirely unto itself.”

She smiled, glad her face was already flushed from the cold of the rain and unable to turn any other colors. “So you’ve told me.” She said softly, following his lead back to camp.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> She's an odd one. Only getting odder the more I think about her.


	3. Marked by the Dread Wolf

_Her ideas didn’t usually inspire grand support from her clan, but this idea was handled worse than the others. It had started as a general musing about the nature of vallaslin and the different symbols used to represent each god. She had asked the Keeper that if they feared Fen’Harel so much that they made offerings to appease him, when why wasn’t there a marking to appease him as well? The question had been answered with stony silence and a cold glare, not that she had been expecting much better than that. Her connection with her clan had been slowly cracking since her brother died, and she wasn’t making any effort to fix it, nor were they being overly accommodating or understanding on their end._

_She’d just worsened matters when she mused that, as in all things concerning the Dread Wolf, perhaps the markings for him were inverse. Perhaps, the absence of vallaslin was indeed the marking of the Dread Wolf, so as to set himself apart from the others. She had grinned then, pulling the evidence as well as she could from stories she had been told as a child. Fen’Harel saving the children in the story of the Slow Arrow, and other such tales. Perhaps that’s why, she mused, being denied your vallaslin when you came of age was considered a punishment, that you were forced to be still marked as the Dread Wolf’s, and not yet ready to be removed from his path._

_It was an incomplete theory, not enough evidence to prove it or disprove it, and she hadn’t really cared. She had just wanted her clan to remember, for even a moment of outrage, that she was still there. She still lived and was aware of the blame laid on her for her brother, and she was aware of the intent of her vallaslin and why it was Sylaise and not Andruil. That it was a wish for what they wanted her to become and not what she truly was._

_No one objected when she disappeared in the woods for a week afterwards, protecting the camp as was expected of her, but not returning to it. She found more comfort in the woods anyways._

She watched her blank face in the mirror, habit now drawing her hand to where the purple ink was missing from her skin. The hope of her clan gone with it. She sneered at herself then, baring teeth at the memory of the day she rankled the Keeper with her half concocted theory. “Marked by the Dread Wolf, I am.” Perhaps she was, she thought with a twisting gut. Her beloved brother had died because of her, her clan had died because of her, everything died around her. Not just living things, but love as well, missing the moment after her markings had gone. Those that didn’t die, left.

“What’re you on about? Talking to yourself is just daft, it is. C’mon, lets go stick arrows in shite, that’ll get you less creepy grinnin’ and more laughing. You’ve gone a bit touched, haven’t you? Well, more touched, innit?” The second elven archer had been at least making an attempt at friendship, so long as she hadn’t said anything ‘too elfy’. Actually, she hadn’t said much at all, but that didn’t seem to bother the Red Jenny.

**Author's Note:**

> Finding that I enjoy doing these little chapters to find out her personality and whatnot. It's kinda funny how you can plan a character one way, and then start writing and discover they're a completely different person sometimes.


End file.
